Mentorship, Allyship, and Sponsorship

Why mentorship and collaboration are important#

"Individual contributor" is a misnomer when it comes to being a senior developer. There’s nothing individual about it; virtually every company expects their senior devs to be mentors for their juniors and force multipliers for their teams.

You might be the smartest person in the company. You might have the deepest knowledge, write the best code, crush tickets faster and cleaner than anyone else in the history of programming. It doesn’t matter if you cannot scale yourself. If you hoard all the knowledge and don’t mentor and collaborate, you are only as useful to the company as an externally hired agency.

The true story of Rick#

Listen to the true story of Rick, a genius developer who did great work but also became a huge bottleneck and refused to accept any systematic remedy. He was an individual contributor, alright. He contributed to the company’s greatest problems and was fired.

Teach them to fish#

The best way to be a 10x developer is to teach ten people what you know. Spend time making sure that engineers who are unfamiliar with the tech or processes not only understand what they are doing but also why they are doing it. “Teach them to fish” is a mandatory skill as a senior engineer, and this requires having both patience and a perspective of investment in the rest of the organization.

You should come to preach apprenticeship patterns as much as you do design patterns. Once they are capable, have them do the same. Encourage a knowledge-sharing culture. Senior engineers lift the skills and expertise of those around them.

Write a lot#

Part of the way you will do this is to write, a lot. This scales your experience across people and time. Just like you document your own code, you should document your own “API” (by writing a personal README for example) and as much context and learning experience as you can articulate.

Be an ally#

As someone with a senior title, you have a lot of power to call out unconscious and systematic bias toward underrepresented minorities in your company. Be an ally. Our industry has tremendous diversity debt accumulated over the past half-century, and this is hurting us and society at large now. You don’t have to be “super woke” to recognize this simple fact. Unintentional sexism and racism occur in the big things like the hiring pipeline, promotion, and project distribution, right down to smaller things like code review and speaker representation.

It’s your job#

You might agree this is a problem but view this as “not my job.” This severely underestimates your power and, therefore, your responsibility to effect change within your own circle of influence. It starts with you. If we want our industry to be better in our lifetimes, we need to play an active role instead of waiting on some “D&I initiative” to magically fix it for us.

Here’s a great list of five things you can do to help, from Karen Catlin of Better Allies:

• Speak their name when they aren’t around
• Endorse them publicly
• Invite them to high-profile meetings
• Share their career goals with decision-makers
• Recommend them for stretch assignments and speaking opportunities

Sponsorship#

Mentorship and allyship are great; sponsorship is even better. Talk is cheap - take an active role in opening doors for underrepresented people! Lara Hogan and Samantha Bretous give great advice on how to be a sponsor, but it is up to each of us to live this advice. When you actively sponsor someone up to a position of influence, the effects can ripple out for decades because they can then turn around and sponsor others.

You still have things to learn#

It’s important not to let the title get to your head. You are still a junior in some things. You do still have things to learn. People junior to you can still tell you things you don’t know. You are as liable to the same cognitive biases in software development you spot in others. Stay humble, stay hungry, stay foolish.

“In every man, there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that, I am his pupil.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson